The idea with the stats for money is a good start. Questions are if one point of defense (e.g. armor) equals a damage point for a weapon. Also a club does 1-3 damage and weights 5 pounds, but a dagger does 1-4 damage but weights less than one pound. So the dagger not only has a damage point more, but also the weight advantage which is useful for weak characters.

But at least I have something to start with and can adjust from there. Thanks

I didn't think about healing spells so far, potions would have been the only source. But I want to include spells to create potions if you have the ingredients and empty flasks.

There is a novelty in not balancing everything your game has to offer. Like your example with weight and damage output. Some players would decide that having a weapon with a higher damage ratio is better because they can kill enemies faster. Other players will want to carry more items on them, so a lower damage output would be a lot better than carrying that extra weight.

You want to leave a little bit in terms of flexibility when you are designing something like an inventory, because you want each player experience to be unique as players go through the game. Also, the more personality you allow the player in the game, the better chances they'll feel the urge to finish the entire thing.

Honestly, it is one of the more harder aspects of gaming because it is one of those things based on feel. Obviously, some weapons will be straight out "better" than others. However, some weapons will reward a fighting style type better than another weapon. It is capitalizing on variety that makes games more interesting over time.

Hopefully, you keep working on this. I always wanted to design a game like this but lacked the time to draw an open world and characters that'll make it feel alive. It is looking really good so far.

club vs. dagger: not all things are made equal. if you can get a dagger, good. if you cant, you might have to make do with a heavy club that isnt as effective as a dagger. a club would naturally be cheaper. i guess if you wanted to get complex, a club would have more chance of knocking someone out in one hit.

Hopefully, you keep working on this. I always wanted to design a game like this but lacked the time to draw an open world and characters that'll make it feel alive. It is looking really good so far.

I've been hesitating a long time too, telling myself that it's too big for me. I've had some bad mental breakdowns in the past years, and sometimes it took a long time to recover. Also I think my brain has seen better days.

At the moment the project is interesting, and I think I found solutions for most of the problems that could have become road blocks. If I don't run into real life problems or another mental breakdown, it might become a project that I can work on for some years, and there is a chance that I can make it an interesting game.

@BurntPizza: I have no sound here, and no headphones, but I'll take a look at the video later the day, when I have better equipment.

@BurntPizza: the guy who speaks the lecture sounds like a machine gun of words to my ears. I can't stand that, sorry. But I guess I got the point. Although I never even hoped to have a perfectly balanced game, since the system is too complex already to balance it. I just want to avoid things which are "clearly better than the other", to make players think and choose strategies

Progress: I've now an hyperactive imp running around on the map. I'll see if I can come up with a somewhat sensible AI. Once I had a project where monster were looking for places to sleep, well to drink from, food and the like. It was rather nice, e.g. one could wait near a well for monsters coming to drink.

I've prepared some code for the combat, and I think once I have an AI which is willing to battle with the player, combat should be done soon. From then, the items actually make sense in the game - but a new problem comes: How to select item drops as rewards for won battles.

- Includes some more items, magic rings and amulets- Some new pre- and postfixes for items, some bugfixes for item coloring- Includes an hyperactive imp, running around (testing monster pathfinding and moving)- Includes stairs up to reach the village map (testing map transitions)- Tab key toggles item name display on map floor

The village map has no functionality, and there is no way back from the village map. It's just to have two maps, a procedurally generated one and a fixed one and to test switching between the maps. The village map also has some graphical glitches, since you can move to areas which should be blocked (e.g. the areas covered by the houses).

There also is some code for handling unidentified items, but since there are no identify scrolls yet, I made all items identified by default. It might happen though that in some parts of the UI the magic pre- and postfixes don't show properly, since this code isn't complete yet.

This looks pretty smooth already. Even with the placeholders in the village I can see its potential. Hopefully you've got some ideas to make this a bit deeper than the usual, which often ends up basically being an isometric shoot-em-up.

-It's a bit hard to click in the right place to move for some reason. Quite often when I click to move, I have clicked on a wall and it doesn't move. (That's obvious, but it doesn't feel right)

-Window is too big on my screen, part of the UI bar is hidden under the windows task bar.

Designing the world and quests will be quite some work. I sure will ask here for advice, so there is hope to get it right Actually I expect this to take a quite long while, designing the world seems to be much work.

The mouse input handler has a bug which prevents subsequent mouse clicks to be recognized if the mouse isn't moved between the clicks. Also the imp disturbs the mouse input handler at times. I hope I can fix both issues soon.

I'll work on a resizable window, in the next release the window will just be a bit less tall. That should help a bit already.

Thanks for the feedback!

Edit:

New version with fixes for mouse input bugs, shorter window and async monster pathfinding (to prevent stalls) - it's been done in a hurry, so I'm not 100% sure if everything works as intended, but it looked alright in my quick tests:

I've added some more graphics from opengameart.org, and improved the monster pathfinding performance. Now there are 50 confused imps on the starting map, moving randomly. Combat has been expanded a bit, physical damage is now actually calculated, and there are very simple effects indicating if you hit an imp. No death animation though, so the imps just vanish upon the final hit. The imps have 20 hitpoints and don't fight back at the moment.

The imps now got some basic AI, which can let them do some tasks. At the moment the only two tasks implemented are sleeping and drinking from a well. Even this little gives the dungeon a much more alive appearance, and it's kind of entertaining just to watch the imps scurry around

Edit: Due to a bug it might happen that maps are generated which have no wells. In that case the imps just sit sulking in their lairs. If that happens, just start the demo again, most often the maps are correctly generated.

The missing well can happen if an imp places its lair on top of the well ... I believe that this even can remove the stairs from the map.

Food! But the mushroom farming code didn't make it into the game yet. A while I also pondered keeping food animals in the dungeon, but moving targets are currently too much of a challenge for the AI.

Also I wonder if some monster should be made to collect things. Jewelry or shiny items, maybe. But they should leave some loot on the floor, I think players expect that from this sort of games.

*grins*

Reminds me of an old character I once sketched up, the janitor orc, who really hates adventurers with dirty, muddy boots He's armed with a bucket, mob and brush, and a skilled fighter with those. Dirtfighter, usually, but he can give a good beating to adventurers too, if they do not take off the dirty boots.

I've got the transitions between the village map and down to the dungeon done. Also cleaned up the code and brushed up some graphics. I feel a bit uncertain about this release, since I had a few crashes while testing, but I couldn't reproduce the problems.

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